Saturday, May 27, 2017

XX (2017)

As I sit here on the holiday weekend hoping for the rain to leave, it was nice to take a break from movies as I have spent time in Twin Peaks and American Gods this week. After two days of investigations and research posts, I decided to get back to a movie with the 2017 anthology XX.

Plot/ XX is a new horror anthology with a gender twist - all segments will be helmed by female directors and will star female leads. The directors have been given free creative rein within budget and time constraints, but all of the segments themselves will involve the horror genre.

Having spent the past couple of days working on a few different pieces of material for the blog, it was nice t get back into some horror. When I saw this anthology at Family Video, I thought the idea of watching a modern anthology would be perfect. While this one did have some positives, I don’t feel that it totally reached its potential. The animation used as the bridge between installments was amazing, the stories had some interesting moments, and the overall feel was entertaining. Of course, the four different segments will have different fans, my favorite was the fourth, Her Only Living Son (although The Box was pretty good), but they all have different attributes that could appeal to a viewer (The Birthday Party and Don’t Fall are just okay). Unfortunately, there are a lot of clichés sprinkled in, the strict run-time limits the depth of the stories, there is no flow or connecting elements to the shorts, and the atmosphere never reaches a tense level. Overall, leaving this a somewhat flawed anthology. In the end, this is not the worst movie out there, but that is not saying to run out and grab it. If you are a fan of indie horror or anthologies, you can do much worse.